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Elizabeth May Makes Pitch To Disaffected NDP Voters

Elizabeth May is no longer alone in making her pitch to NDP voters - Paul Manly is now also taking up the battle.

Once an 'orange diaper baby,' Manly begins life as a Green MP

Paul Manly said Friday that he was once an “orange diaper baby,” but now feels like the NDP has “abandoned a lot of their principles.”

... “My parents are both Green Party members, and had been out canvassing for me. It was a process for my family. My parents were CCF members; they were at the founding convention of the NDP,” he said, referring to the NDP predecessor, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation.

“I canvassed with Tommy Douglas to get my father elected on my sixteenth birthday. So I’m an orange diaper baby. But my daughter isn’t an orange diaper baby. Neither is my granddaughter.”

... Asked to differentiate his beliefs from those held by the federal NDP, Manly referred to policy positions on defence, trade and natural resources, as well as differences in terms of parliamentary behaviour.

“The NDP have abandoned a lot of their principles. They voted for bombing Libya,” he said. In 2011, the NDP under Jack Layton approved Canada's role in the NATO-led military intervention in the North African country. The party later withdrew its support.

“They voted for the Canada-Korea free trade agreement, even though it had investor-state provisions in it,” Manly added. The NDP under Thomas Mulcair declared its support for the Harper government’s trade deal with South Korea in 2014.

Current NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh has also expressed support for the Coastal GasLink LNG pipeline in B.C., saying "the company and the government have done significant work to obtain the consent and partnership of Indigenous communities."

The Green Party is against the pipeline, and Manly said he believed it would lead to more fracking. The province's Oil and Gas Commission suspended fracking operations after a series of earthquakes.

The Green MP also noted how Vision Green commits MPs to conduct themselves “respectfully” in the House of Commons, never heckling or using ad hominem attacks, and the party would never "whip" a vote, forcing an MP to toe a party line.

“One of the key differences is the way we behave in Parliament. We don’t heckle, we don’t use personal attacks. We stick to the issues, we treat other MPs respectfully. And we work across party lines for what’s in the best interests of our constituents and Canadians,” he said.

“We also don’t have a whipped vote. So Elizabeth can’t tell me what to say, and she can’t tell me how to vote. In effect, I’m working with Green Party policy which I support, but I am free to be representing my constituents and to follow my conscience, and to follow the policies that I’ve been elected on.”

... On Friday, Manly described the Conservatives, Liberals and NDP as all tainted when it came to environmental issues.

“What we have is the three old parties,” he said. “The Conservatives can’t even agree on a carbon tax or minor adjustments to deal with climate change. The Liberals bought a pipeline, and want to expand the oilsands. The NDP, depending on where they are, are either supporting oilsands expansion or fracked gas.”

Wow! Thanks Wood. Very interesting. I especially like the no whipped votes. I wish that was the law. My choice of representative should mean something beyond which party has power. My representative should have power because that in turn gives me power. It means if my community feels strongly about something our representative has a vested interest in voting the way we want or in having our representative raise the topic regardless of how the party feels. That in turn forces the party to take my views into account.

Elizabeth May was on The West Block on Global TV and asked about the target on her back by the NDP, she said that the NDP has taregting her for years - going all the way back from working with the Conservatives to keep her out of the debate. So this is nothing new.

That is about tax breaks not climate change, pollution, or pipelines and one speech isn't taking up the Green New Deal. The NDP has not been the party for environmentalists so the Green Party was born and got support.

Layton has demanded a moratorium on oil sands development, and criticized the "tax grab" it provides to oil and gas companies.

In a statement released on the NDP website Layton said: "Despite warnings from his own government agencies, Harper fast tracked Imperial Oil's Kearl tar sands development, north of Fort McMurray, without any conditions to mitigate the significant impacts on the environment."

Elizabeth May was on The West Block on Global TV and asked about the target on her back by the NDP, she said that the NDP has taregting her for years - going all the way back from working with the Conservatives to keep her out of the debate. So this is nothing new.

Why is she on with her contiuned petty sniping at the NDP and making things personal when Layton was the only leader to congratulate her for winning a seat in 2011, to cheers and applause from his supporters who were gathered there?

The NDP has not been the party for environmentalists so the Green Party was born and got support.

Chantal Hebert agrees with that, and wrote a column stating "the NDP no longer has first call on environmental activists."

It is convenient in New Democrat ranks these days to blame Singh’s uneven performance for all that ails the party, but the NDP relinquished the high ground on the environment to the Greens long before he became its leader.

In the 2008 election, Jack Layton campaigned against Stéphane Dion’s Green Shift, often using some of the same arguments as Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.

Layton claimed Dion’s proposed carbon tax would hurt consumers, and would be little more than a nuisance for energy producers. Like Harper’s party, his NDP was a promoter of a cap-and-trade system and a detractor of carbon taxes.

Layton’s successor was initially a fan of the Energy East pipeline.

“It's a win-win to bring (bitumen oil) from west to east. It’s better prices for the producers and therefore more royalties for the producing provinces. It’s better energy security for Canada and it's more jobs here,” Thomas Mulcair told Canadian Press about Trans Canada’s now defunct project in a 2014 interview.

Like Trudeau, the NDP spent the last election campaign not explicitly promising to nix Energy East, but committing instead to an overhaul of the regulatory process that leads to the approval of new pipelines.

For as long as the New Democrats had a credible shot at federal power, they did not need to spend too much time looking over their shoulders for the then-distant Green Party. As recently as four years ago, May was little more than a dot in Mulcair’s rearview mirror.

From the NDP’s perspective, it was good politics to campaign on being more committed to climate change than the other main parties without scaring off voters who favoured a middle course between energy and the environment.

But now May is breathing down the NDP’s tired neck and moves made by Singh’s immediate predecessors are coming back to haunt his party.

The NDP can only hope that its survival as a vital force in the next House of Commons does not depend on it beating the Greens to the climate-change punch next fall.

Jack Layton got it right in 2008, but then he and the party shifted towards "responsibile" use of the tar sands - pardon me: we have to call it "oil sands" now - until they wound up catastrophically wrong in 2015. So much so, an exceptional candidate like Linda McQuaig was left hanging for saying what Layton had said seven years before.

Elizabeth May is continuing to make the media rounds, arguing that it is HER party (and not the NDP) that Green voters need to flock to. Her newest Salvo is throwing her support behind Justin Trudeau! Saying that if Andrew Scheer wins the most seats in a hung Parliament, she would be open to forming some type of "cooperation" to keep Andrew Scheer OUT

It’s the way our Westminster parliamentary system works, she said. “You can’t do that without talking to each other and figuring out what do we have in common here, with whom do we have the most in common? How do we make this work so the people of Canada feel that the way they cast their votes has resulted in the parliament they want.”

May is careful about setting out her conditions for support. She still believes electoral reform is a “critical issue for improving the fairness of Canadian democracy” but she’s sobered by what she witnessed in British Columbia, where she feels John Horgan’s NDP government kept to the letter of the B.C. Greens’ demand for a new electoral system but not the spirit of their agreement.

“Whether we make it a condition or just through persuasion or just through popular support, whatever it takes, we really do need to shift through a system of voting where the way the Canadian public votes is the way the Canadian Parliament is formed after the election.”

It seems May has little respect for democracy. So far Canadians have rejected PR. It seems to be something pushed entirely by political parties.

Having political parties that represent the diversity of opinion in a country even the minority is the very essence of democracy. I disagree with Quebec sovereignty and Quebec has rejected that option twice, but there should still be parties that advocate for it because 30% or so believe in that option and they deserve representation too. The same is true of MMP and as a politician it is May's job to bring people to her side on the issue by convincing them.

May representing a minority policy position isn't anti-democratic, it is democracy.

“Whether we make it a condition or just through persuasion or just through popular support, whatever it takes, we really do need to shift through a system of voting where the way the Canadian public votes is the way the Canadian Parliament is formed after the election.”

In other words force Canadians to accept PR as a condition of keeping the Conservatives out. So far Canadians choose FPTP. Maybe Canadians are wrong to do so and just don't understand but it is still undemocratic to force it on people who don't want it.

Things are looking up for May. Before the byelection win she only got on TV if drunk and disorderly or arrested by police.

The byelection Green vote is a protest vote that will not be repeated in a general election. If really desperate, maybe May can hold a boxing match with Mr. Dressup. May's sartorial splendour can be left to the raging grannies while his nibs, of course, goes nowhere without his well stocked tickle trunk.